Not totally in vain

A year ago, the day I turned 62, we were in North Carolina, visiting some Delmar expatriates (they have since moved back) and enjoying the full flush of a mid-Atlantic spring.

62 sounded kind of old to me then - old enough to get Social Security if I wanted, old enough so that the occasional movie discounts started to turn into a flood of money-saving offers.

I'm glad I didn't realize at the time that I was less than 6 weeks from my cancer diagnosis, although I suppose that means we could have started fighting it earlier. But it sure would have screwed up even more last spring.

63 now sounds terribly youthful for someone with this affliction, and sounds like someone who should have a long slow glide into old age. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I already got the best birthday card anyone should ever get. It shows a little girl bending down on a sidewalk. She is saying that she used to think that having good luck was finding a dime on the sidewalk or a four-leaf clover.

Then you open the card and she says, "Now I realize it was having you as a Dad.''

All of these years haven't been totally in vain.

For outsider zero chance of drawing a line in the sand

I was smart enough not to pledge that yesterday would be the final extra-word post, in part because the entries just keeping better. I WILL semi-pledge this is the last one, unless I get some really good ones.

New entries:

-- 0 percent chance of rain, or snow or sun. Zero is zero.

-- 12 noon or 12 midnight. It will not be 11 p.m. midnight or 3 a.m. noon. Midnight is plenty.

-- "Globally based'' business. As opposed to what, a snide friend asks, celestially based?

-- Outsider. Every politician wants to be one. Even Andrew Cuomo can claim that, since he was away in Washington for a while. Reporters, of course, all want to be "insiders,'' as do the sources they seem to quote most often, even if they don't tell us who they actually are.

-- Agent of change. Ditto. Even if you just wear a bow tie, you'll change something.

-- Draw a line in the sand. It's only good until the next time the wind comes up.

If you can beat these, let me know. Of course we may be reduced to actual conversations with people, which brings with it a whole other set of problems.

More language-cleansings

There are a few other words and phrases that should beat least temporarily retired from everyday usage, according to responders to yesterday's posting.

Among them:

-- "Perfect storm.'' The movie is now a decade old and it seems like it's used to describe almost any coincidence.

-- "Back on track.'' Aren't railroads and streetcars mostly dead? Besides, it's confusing since you often hear sportscasters say some team or player is getting "untracked,'' which is also a good thing. We need a new auto metaphor before they're gone too.

-- "I gave 110 percent.'' Something any self-respecting athlete does, except, of course, it is physically impossible. I read once somewhere that most people optimum performance is about 85 percent. More than that is a struggle and with less boredom tends to set in. But I feel for sportswriters. Getting a spontaneous, interesting quote out of an athlete seems harder than blood from a stone, to coin an original comparison.

-- "Here on the ground.'' Reporters are saying this more and more. Those flying overhead are not saying "here in the air.'' I think we can assume reporters are filing from the ground unless they tell us otherwise.

-- "Wall St-Main St." This false dichotomy assumes everybody on Wall St. is a bad guy while those Main Streeters are virtuous. Too bad the world isn't that simple.

-- "At the end of the day.'' Makes the wrapup of something sound far more portentous than it is. At the end of the day, I go to bed.

A triump for bipartisanship reform

I don't know how many words the average English-speaking adult utters in a single day, but I have decided to try to limit mine.

Not the volume, just the ones I select.

Scheduled for the dust bin, because politicians and others have stripped them of all meaning:

-- Reform. It's anything a politician favors, from welfare reform to civil-service reform to ethics reform Even if its effect is the opposite.

-- Win-win. Sports fans know it's an impossibility, but it's a great phrase to try to hide some deal behind.

-- Transparent. If a politician said something is, it probably isn't.

-- My good friend. In a political context, it's someone you're about to knife in the back.

-- Bipartisanship. The partisan shiv is about to enter between the ribs.

This is just meant to be a sampler. But next time you're listening to a political speech, think how much time language reform would save you - a win-win for both parties, and a triumph of bipartisanship and transparency where everyone realizes what good friends they are.

Please help me add to the list.

Money still the issue

I was minding my own business today, having a turkey sandwich after the rigors of the radio show and a nap, when I made the mistake of turning on the television.

One little secret I never told my former employers is that when I get the all-inclusive cable package so I can watch the Red Sox, the state legislative channel comes with it.

For some reason the TV was on this channel when I turned on the TV today, and the first words I heard were "this is outrageous.''

Of course this isn't much help in figuring out what is going on around here these days, since so much of it is outrageous.

It took me a few minutes to realize it was the Assembly Republican ranking member on the Assembly Ways and Means Committee Jim Hayes of suburban Buffalo complaining about the Democrats not holding public meetings on the new state budget that is now almost a month overdue.

His counterpart, Denny Farrell of Harlem, said the Assembly Dems are trying to get the Senate to meet with them, so far without success.

"The issue is still basically money,'' Farrell said.

That was enough enlightenment for one day, I decided, as I clicked over to Sports Center on ESPN.

It's hard being a star

I give up. I can't imagine how actors learn pages and pages of dialogue.

Every year I am in the show that reporters put on spoofing, or rather skewering, politicians. I usually have a couple songs to learn plus a few lines of dialogue. In this year's show, which will take place a week from this Friday and Saturday on May 7th and 8th, I've cut back to merely one song and one character. I have spent some time this weekend trying to memorize the song and lines.

It's actually not that hard sitting in my living room, or even in a rehearsal, getting most of the lines more or less right. But it's a whole different deal when on show night the lights come up and the music starts, and something is supposed to come out of my mouth.

I did learn a long time ago that acing my numbers Friday night was not necessarily a predictor of what would happen Saturday. The key is staying focused, not relaxing, and alas, not drinking too much.

The worst experience I remember was in the early 1990s playing NY City Mayor Ed Koch. I was doing a duet version of Billy Joel's song "You may be right, I may be crazy." My partner and I decided to spice it up with some choreography, but when I came out of a spin and opened my mouth, I realized I had totally forgotten the second verse. So I just sang the first verse again.

Then there was the time, more than 20 years ago, that I was so enjoying a glass of wine or two, that I didn't make it to the stage for the finale. I mention this reluctantly, because this rare instance of excess is still a sore point in our family, even after all these years.

Just a few more notes along these lines: I was doing a duet with a certain former reporter who is now a high-ranking Capital Region news executive, when I realized he had totally forgotten his half of the song. I don't remember how we got through that, but he sounded so good even muttering his way through it that it didn't make much difference.

There have also been instances of reporters writing lyrics on their hands, a la Sarah Palin, and another who wrote them on the inside of his hat, before, in an unfortunate show of exuberance, he tossed the hat into the crowd, leaving him speechless.

We're hoping for no such hijinks this year. We figure there's enough bungling going on around here without us adding to it.

Happy anniversary to the blog

Back when I worked for the afternoon Rochester Times-Union we would often make people scratch their heads by running stories a little bit in advance of anniversaries, like four years and 11 months after Attica, nine years, 11 months and six days after that city's riots, etc.

The reason was since we were competing with the morning Democrat and Chronicle, we wanted to be first with our story. If we waited for the actual anniversary, we would more than likely get scooped - the worst sin in a competitive news environment.

Although you may have noticed that this blog doesn't have any competition (can't imagine why) old habits die hard.

That's why today I'm marking my 290th blog entry since we started last June and the soon-to-be (Sunday) the 10-month anniversary of my cancer surgery.

I don't mean "we'' in an editorial sense. The blog was Ellen's idea, and she and Janice wrote the first several entries when I was still in the hospital as by far the most efficient way to keep people up with how I was doing.

Then when I started to feel a little better, I dictated the entries to one of them, and finally took off the training wheels shortly after I got home in early July and began to write them myself. I remember on our cruise last January that dictating the blog to one of them was one of the highlights of the day.

Since June, the blog has become, besides family and friends, my most reliable tool for dealing with the ups and downs of the whole experience - letting me enjoy the good moments more and helping me over the rough stretches.

I hope to have many more real anniversaries of the blog to celebrate.

One lemon bar a la carte, s'il vous plait

It's back to a lemon bar for dinner.

That was the scrumptious menu for me tonight after an effort to have a hearty lunch of a steak sandwich and banana cream pudding after my 28th chemo infusion didn't work out so well.

So it's back to babying my digestive symptom, although I haven't yet descended to the Gerber's level. I'm hoping that a mango lassi, a delicious Indian smoothie-like drink, and a cup of rainbow sherbet is in my immediate future.

Despite the rather grim day, during which I napped much of the time, Janice's arrival immensely lifted my spirits this evening. She is on her way from Ithaca to Newport, RI to deliver a paper on international law and human rights in Latin America at a political science conference.

I would try to explain more, but it would just make my head hurt. She's also going to spend the night with us Saturday on the way home.

Meanwhile, this is my last chemo for three weeks. Next week, it's time for my regular break, and then the week after I'm taking an extra week off to diminish the chances that I'll fall asleep in the middle of my song at the LCA show, the annual roasting of Albany politicians by the press corps.

Wonder who and what we could possibly make fun of this year?

Another sign of approaching apocalypse

I have entered some kind of new sports-fan's netherworld, and I'm not sure whether it's good thing.

For example, I didn't have the stomach to watch the Celtics-Heat basketball game last night, since I find losses by my team so painful that it ruins the whole night.

So I recorded it, and saw in the paper that the good guys had won, rather handily. So I watched some of it today, confidently awaiting a 19-0 Celtics run that happened right just as the paper said it would.

And by the way, here's the newest sign of the approaching Apocalypse: The Gannett papers in New Jersey are letting the New Jersey Devils hockey team write stories about their games, and are then publishing them!

The rationale is the papers can't afford to cover the team any more, and the team needs the publicity and the readers want to know who won. But the whole idea of journalism, I was taught back in the last century, was to give readers an objective view of what happens. Certainly, reading a sports writer's dripping-with-sarcasm story about a team that isn't going well, or calling for all the bums to quit, is a source of deep pleasure to me.

Oh well. At least we don't have Republican and Democratic reporters covering politics. Yet.

CSI Albany gets another case

I know many of you out-of-staters take a perverse pride in the corruption and dysfunction of your state government, but certainly today New York has to claim its rightful place at the top of the heap of screwed-up operations.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, even more likely to be the next governor than the Yankees are of winning another World Series, charged today that the majority leader of the state Senate, Pedro Espada of the Bronx, has looted a health-care company he runs (mostly with taxpayer money) of $14 million for a severance package, fancy trips, hundreds of family meals from sushi restaurants and direct campaign expenses, among other personal costs.

Then this weekend, a book is due out that will detail chapter and verse how former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, once considered a crusading reformer, fell into becoming Client number 9 of a high priced prostitution ring and forced to resign in disgrace.

And of course there was the farce last summer of the aforementioned Espada with a colleague swinging back and forth between parties, being the key members of a coup that toppled the Democratic leadership temporarily.

I won't go on with the dozens of other cases of domestic abuse, bribery and corruption that have swept the Capitol for the past few years. But certainly Illinois and New Jersey, probably our two closest contenders for most corrupt governments, have to be taken up short.

Hey, one has to take his points of pride where he can find 'em. And certainly reporters, who are a quarrelsome bunch, have no complaints about things to write about.

In fact, in just a couple of weeks they will be presenting their annual dinner and show, this year entitled: "CSI: Albany - One Flew Over the Coup-Coup's Nest.''

The place is now nuttier than Randle Patrick Murphy, the Jack Nicholson character in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

No train wreck yet

I have never flown a plane solo, or any other way for that matter, but I got a little taste of what that might feel like today.

Rather than doing my typical gig as the "cohost'' of the radio show Capitol Pressroom, I had my hand on the controls, at least of the conversation.

For some reason, I agreed to do it for a couple of days while the veteran pilot, Susan Arbetter, took the week off.

My hands weren't actually on the controls, which is just as well, since my Luddite proclivities (see yesterday's post) would have precluded a smooth flight. The production assistant Patrick was there not only to hit the right buttons but also tell me when to stop and start talking.

The tensest time for the hour-long show occurred a few minutes before we went on the air when we learned our planned guest for the first 20 minutes or so, Mike Gormley of the AP, had been held up. Patrick, the production assistant told me and Blair Horner of NYPIRG, who slipped into my normal "cohost'' role that gave us all of that time to talk about anything we wanted to.

Great.

But it turned out to be no problem. I just asked Blair what it was like to be a good-government lobbyist in such a cynical town and how he avoided becoming jaded. Next thing I knew I looked up and 20 minutes had passed.

The next segment was easily filled by two noted veteran Albany spinmeisters Steve Greenberg and Bob Bellafiore, who had a new Siena poll to talk about.

Then the previously missing Mr. Gormley stuck his head in the door. I asked him how to fix Albany. He mentioned my book. The hour was over.

Go to http://Capitolpressroom.org for local times and stations, as they say, or listen to us on the web. Inside tip: there would very well be a train wreck tomorrow.

A Luddite's conversion

For all of a Luddite's reservations about technology, I have to admit that this blogging thing does serve an important purpose.

We went to our annual church dinner last night, and I'd say more than a dozen people commented on my latest post, and wondered if I'd had a good dinner (not bad - managed to force down a piece of chocolate cake after some soup of leg of lamb) since food was the subject of my Friday posting.

For someone in my position it beats having to repeat the same information over and over and even allow us to move along to something more interesting to talk about (what the hell IS wrong with the Red Sox?)

As Emily often says, when she goes somewhere it seems that the people she sees know almost as much as she does about how I'm doing.

Maybe I'll some day feel the same way about twitter, I-phones and all of the other things I can't yet fathom, although that's hard to imagine.

Eat, eat, eat!

Getting chemo is no picnic, and watching the cooking channel in the chemo room while getting the treatment doesn't make it any better.

I had never before watched the channel (but thoroughly enjoyed the movie "Julia and Julie") and hopefully never will again.

I suppose the experience was the same for me as it is for sports fans forced to watch ESPN: people I don't know doing something I don't care about and for some reason being excited about it.

I know we all eat, which is an important thing to have in common, but has not been near of the top of the things I like to do recently.

I mentioned my delicious lemon-bar dinner yesterday, which I supplemented with jell-o and then some sherbet. Hit the spot. But I bounced back today by devouring one of those overstuffed turkey-salad sandwiches that the Delmar Marketplace is justifiably famous for, at least in this house.

The task for tonight: polish off a (frozen) three-ounce lobster tail and some macaroni and cheese (good protein.)

170 pounds, here I come!!

Look what's for dinner

The doc had mostly good news today when we discussed with him my latest round of tests.

Most importantly, lat week's CT Scan showed no growth in the size of the tumor, and the suspicious growth on my liver remains the same size.

I also put on two pounds this week, quite an accomplishment for someone who has more and more trouble even looking at food. Apparently what I always suspected is true: milk shakes make you fat. It's not enough to have had my track coach yell at me back in the day, but it's still moving in the right direction. I've also felt a little better for the past few days after a couple of downer weeks.

The source of that is still something of a mystery, although a new drug regime I'm on seems to be helping.

A possible concern is there may be a new tumor in the intestine, although the CT Scan showed no evidence of it.

The new chemo cocktail that I had today has been altered in recent weeks over the weeks made me pretty nauseous, although that may have been from trying to have lunch at the same time. Looks like a lemon bar for dinner tonight.

Doesn't sound bad.

Time travel, Albany style

I know many of you, especially who live outside New York, move onto other things when you expect a blog entry to be about state government. But give this one a shot. It involves time travel.

Today Gov. Paterson was asked by reporters, as he frequently is, about progress, or lack thereof, in reaching an agreement with the Legislature on a new state budget.

"We're going to have to exert a greater effort to get the budget done on time,'' he responded.

This temporarily nonplussed the gathered press corps, who of course were aware that the budget was due on April 1 - two weeks ago, for those keeping score.

But Paterson continued on, oblivious, talking as he usually does about the need for more budget cuts, the state's critical cash-flow situation and maybe even pension buyouts for state workers, as well as the Legislature's chronic inability to make tough choices.

"This is an issue of courage,'' said Paterson, who will be watching this year's elections from the safety is the sidelines, since he said he's not running for another term.

But even someone with no interest in state government can see that it's hard to put together a spending plan when you don't seem to even know when the deadline is.

How do we get away with this?

"Don't shoot on the subway, Bernie,
Don't blow out the mugger's brains.
Don't shoot on the subway Bernie,
The time's not ripe for the Charlie Bronson bit,
Now get along, don't make a mess on the trains.''

With these immortal words sung in 1985 (to the tune of Petula Clark's "Don't Sleep on the Subway'') about Manhattan subway shooter Bernhard Goetz, I launched one aspect of my life I would never have expected: 26 straight years singing, talking and dancing in a show that people actually pay to see. I have dressed up like Mario Cuomo as Batman, George Pataki as a Mexican peasant and Chuck Schumer as a nerd with taped-up glasses and a belt worn just under my armpits. Only once, when playing Ed Koch, did I come out of a tricky dance spin and draw a blank on my lyrics.

Tonight was the first rehearsal for the 2010 version of the show, and I found that I still can carry a tune and sing loudly - my two principal show-biz skills (those of you who have heard me do this know I am not being falsely modest.)

The 110th edition of the nation's longest running political satirical show is scheduled to be performed here the second weekend in May. Then we give the pols chance to give it back to us.

I am always struck by the same three observations as we start rehearsals. The first is we have many clever reporters and pr people who really know how to rhetorically stick in the knife, and slowly twist twist it. And of course, most reporters tend to be over-the-top hams. No surprise there.

The third is what a great country we have that the people who control the police and the army don't have us all rounded up and, if not shot, at least severely beaten upside the head and thrown in the cooler for a while. Far from it. In fact, the ritual has evolved to to point where the biggest fear of most pols is not to be mentioned in the show.

It looks like I'm going to get the chance to be in at least one more show. I'm grateful for that.

Can Tiger still score if he doesn't win?

After close to a lifetime of research and the last four days in front of the television set, I have reached an important conclusion: could I have picked a sport to have played professionally, it would have been golf.

The Master's tournament this weekend clinched it for me because you can do it for most of your life. There was Tom Watson, a mere two years younger than me, in contention for the title until today. There was Fred Couples, 50, who came within a few strokes of winning.

Even that rascal, Tiger Woods, who would be at 34 considered past his prime in most sports, probably has his best golf years in front of him, although his peak libido time has probably passed (just as well). He finished fourth today.

Athletes in the major spectator sports, especially football, are generally battered and retired by the time they're Tiger's age, often too beaten up physically to go out on the town (just we well.) The baseball player still in the Big Leagues after age 35 is exceptional. Basketball and tennis players, whose exertions makes my knees wince just to look at them, usually have a sharp dropoff in skills not long after 30 and often can barely limp home to their spouses (just as well).

I know the mental pressures of golf are brutal, not so much for those on the leader board of the Master's as those struggling to qualify in big-money events. Still, from the perspective of a hacker and fan, it sounds better than making cold calls trying to sell vinyl siding, which also lacks the sex appeal of being a big-time athlete. (just as well, or we'd all be getting our houses resided semi-annually, I suspect.)

Another day, another CT scan

Another day, another CT scan.

Similar to and yet unlike yesterday's delicious vanilla milkshake (which helped me add two pounds to my now-slender build) , I had to drink the 32 ounces of some chalk-like substance this morning that enhances the quality of the CT scan photos taken today. It was my fifth such procedure since last June.

I think you can buy 32 ounces of a soft drink at some fast-food restaurants, but after my experience with this stuff ("chalk-like'' overstates the mixture's gastronomic appeal) the thought of that much of anything to drink almost makes me gag.

But any of you who have had a procedure like this knows that its huge advantages are it's quick (five minutes or so) and not claustrophobia-inducing (the circlular machine you're slid into feels spacious).

Also it gave me a handy place to hand over my credit card for the x-number of times so I can pay my $40 co-pay for the procedure. Seems like I can't get out of the house much these days without coming up with a co-pay.

We're to meet with our doc here next Thursday to find out what they learned, if anything, from the procedure.

Someone asked me today if I wasn't unhappy about having to wait so long for the results. The answer is no. Isn't there some saying about the devil you know as opposed to the devil you don't? My attitude is the reverse of that this time. I'll find out soon enough.

At least I got to have a milk shake

Not exactly a lot of jumping for joy today when we got some test results from our doc. The cancer blood marker had a relatively small uptick from a month ago, (from 87 to 106), and I have lost 10 pounds in the past month.

So even though I had a CT-scan only five weeks ago that showed no growth of the tumor and no expansion to other parts of the body, I'm having another one tomorrow, after having chemo today.

On the plus side, the doc endorsed my plan to stop for a milk shake on the way home, and generally eat anything I want, no matter how unhealthy in the long term, to try to stop or reverse the sudden weight loss.

I am now down to almost my college running weight. I remember in those days eating it seemed almost constantly to offset the calories I was burning by running 10 miles a day. This is different.

We'll know more next week after the doc tells us the results of the latest scan. Maybe the Sox will be in first place by then.

See ya, Michael Kay

People who know me well will tell you I do not part easily with a buck, so I'm having this annual tug-of-war with myself.

In order to have every Red Sox game available to me on TV, I have to pay the cable company Time Warner an extra $160 over four months. I think I already pay them far too much.

That's actually only about a dollar a game if I watched every game, but I am not doing that - or worse, will feel pressure to watch because I've paid the money. Plus it might as well be a test pattern to Emily, so why not save the dough this year as well as passing on the heartache?

In addition, if I learned anything last season, it is that the world, after tilting off its axis for four years (resulting in Sox championships in 2004 and 2007) has returned to normal. The hated, cocky, overpaid, obnoxious Yankees won their 27th championship, much to the delight of their smug, cocky, obnoxious fans, and the Sox blew it at the end. That's been the story of what has happened for most of my life and will probably happen again this year.

But events of this week have made it likely I will make the investment. I watched the first two games of the regular season matching up the Yanks and Sox on YES, the Yankees station, which is part of our cable package (no extra money, in other words.

Both games were exciting, with the Sox coming from behind to win the first game, and the Yanks doing the same in the second.

But watching it on the Yanks station, well, sucks. I think it's worth the money just to always watch Sox-Yanks games on NESN, the Sox station, which has properly biased announcers. (Those of you of a political bent might think of these two as the Fox and MSNBC of sports broadcasting.) That means I will never have to he hear Yanks announcer Michael Kay yell "see ya'' one one of the billionaires in the middle of their overstuffed lineup hits a home run.

Sounds more and more like a bargain at twice the price.

The good, the bad and the hungry

The good news out of Monday's procedure is that I do not have any blockage between my stomach and intestine, and they used some great drugs to prevent me from experiencing anything while they stuck a long hose-like device down my throat.

The bad news, unfortunately, is there isn't anything they can do right away about the pain in my gut. Apparently the tumor is lying in a way that constricts movement, which is why it hurts so much after meals. And they can't take the tumor out for the same reason they couldn't in June: it's encasing a key blood vessel.

I do have some more medications to use, including something with codeine that helps me forget most everything. But it is hard to imagine that as a long-term solution. Other medications help the digestive process "move along,'' which sounds like an improvement over "stalled.''

I should also eat smaller, but more, meals and blander food. Good thing I learned to like my mother's cooking.

Monday is the big day

Doc today confirmed what we were told yesterday - that I appear to have some kind of blockage between my stomach and intestine.

So the plan is to do a procedure Monday that will not only confirm that diagnosis, but put in a stent to widen the opening. This a relatively simple thing to do because it is done through my esophagus and not cutting from the outside. Plus I'm knocked out during the whole thing. Or maybe it is just an ulcer, which would be even better, since that can be treated with just drugs.

Meanwhile it's pudding, jello and other soft food for the most part - for example, burgers rather than steaks. There are worse things.

A setback

I have suffered a setback that could keep me out of action for a while.

It seems that the opening from my stomach to the intestine has shrunk or is blocked, either by scar tissue from my operation (most likely), an ulcer (possible, not likely) or a tumor (maybe, but probably not).

So whenever I eat, which used to be one of my favorite activities, the food has backed up, distending my stomach and making me feel like I'm wearing a belt three sizes too small. And I've been shedding weight almost like someone who has had biatric surgery and have had far less energy even than the reduced amount I was becoming accustomed to.

I'm supposed to find out tomorrow if this can be easily dealt with, which is the expectation for now. Meanwhile, it's good to have an explanation of why I have felt progressively worse for the last few weeks.